10 Self-Made Australian Bitcoin Millionaires

By Crypto News Australia August 08, 2023

Australian millionaires are popping up all over the place and it’s mostly thanks to Bitcoin. The king of cryptocurrency has been around for over 10 years now, and recently we have seen a growing number of savvy investors who have transformed themselves into self-made millionaires.

Disclaimer: Before you continue reading, this is a list of publicly available information collated to you for free entertainment purposes. Unless stated, we do not have any proof that these people made millions from Bitcoin so if you think any information is wrong, please let us know. Crypto News also has tried to make contact with everyone on the list to verify the details.

Now that institutions are hopping on the Bitcoin bandwagon, it’s the retail investors who are reaping the rewards from the best performing asset of all time. As the conservative go unconventional and alternative investments become mainstream, the Bitcoin millionaire phenomenon is growing at a sensational rate – who is next?

Here are some of the wealthy Australians who made their millions by investing in Bitcoin early: our list of 10 Australian Bitcoin Millionaires.

Kain Warwick

Kain is a blockchain enthusiast and founder of Synthetix, a decentralised synthetic asset platform that supports multiple fiat currencies and commodities. Originally named Havven, it was a stablecoin project through an initial coin offering in February 2018. Havven rebranded itself to Synthetix in March 2020 and quickly became a prominent player in the decentralised finance market, with currently over $2 billion SNX marketcap. Before creating Synthetix, Warwick also co-founded Blueshyft – a cash payment gateway that supports over-the-counter Bitcoin purchases. He is an advisory council member of Blockchain Australia, promoting the adoption of blockchain technology in Australia. Back in the day, he was a tennis coach and also a touring musician with his band The Lie Society, based in Boston. Kain is from Sydney, where he now lives. According to realestate.com.au Warwick bought his parents a house for a whopping $12.2 million, and has over $34 million invested in other house deals. You can follow Warwick on Twitter: @kaiynne

Sergei Sergienko

Featured on 60 Minutes Australia “Crazy Rich”, Sergei Sergienko is a Russian-born self-declared Australian Bitcoin multimillionaire. He reckons he is worth a whopping $100 million! It is a dream come true, only possible thanks to the digital gold rush of Bitcoin, buying BTC from as low as $6, and Sergei has been accumulating and trading it ever since, taking his profits into the millions. According to the interview, Sergei took a punt when he secured a bank loan and invested into BTC. Being an early cryptocurrency pioneer has certainly paid off as Sergei continues to trade and invest in crypto and runs a handful of businesses. He is the founder and CEO of Chrono.tech, a global blockchain startup headquartered in Sydney; co-founder of MHC Digital Finance, a digital asset fund also based in Sydney; and the co-founder and director of Edway Group, one of Australia’s biggest recruitment companies. You can follow Sergei Sergienko on Twitter: @svsergienko.

Mimi Ho

According to a Financial Review interview, 36-year-old Mimi Ho, from Brisbane, started investing nine years ago, initially as a hobby, although she was prepared to put some coin behind it. She began investing $10,000 into Bitcoin and some other major altcoins and has continued to use her profits to build the portfolio into seven-digit figures. When she started out, she was a part-owner of an IT company, but says she is now turning over more cash than when she was running the business. Ms Ho believes crypto is the way of the future and that it has been her best investment to date. In the past nine years, she has amassed almost $8 million. You can follow Mimi Ho’s trading on Etoro’s copy trading.

Chris O’Shea

According to a Nine News interview, Chris O’Shea is a “self-made” millennial millionaire who has accumulated a fortune of around $20 million. O’Shea, 30, has totally transformed his life, initially investing $10,000 in 2013, much to the disbelief of friends and family who thought he’d gone mad. The former pub manager from Mount Druitt in Sydney’s west now enjoys a lavish lifestyle driving Range Rovers and cruising luxury yachts; sounds like the lifestyle.

Daniel Maegaard

According to an interview with The Hustle, Daniel Maegaard, a 30-year-old from Brisbane, has made a crypto fortune – not once, but twice. First when he was only 22, as he speculated $4k into Bitcoin in 2013 when it was worth around $150 per coin. After learning more about it, he said he was certain Bitcoin’s scarcity would lead to it increasing in price. He caught the crypto bug and got into other altcoins such as Ripple early, and is now also making a fortune in NFTs. From just a few thousand dollars eight years ago, Daniel now claims to be a happy crypto self-made millionaire, with approximately $10 million to his name. You can follow Daniel Maegaard on Twitter: @seedphrase

Craig Wright

Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright is the man who claims to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Though this has been debunked pretty heavily, he is, however, a Bitcoin millionaire. Craig now lives in a big house in London and is continuing his infamous ongoing court battle over the Bitcoin whitepaper copyright ownership. He has yet to provide any verifiable evidence of his authorship of the original Satoshi whitepaper or collaboration with known early developers. He also refuses, or is unable, to provide the one piece of evidence that would prove his claim: you guessed it – the original Satoshi Nakamoto private key. If he is Satoshi, then he is sitting on a 1,000,000 BTC fortune.

Craig Cobb

Craig Cobb is an experienced trader based in Sydney, Australia who first got into crypto in 2017 after a mate told him he needed to check it out. He found there was a gap in the market for quality courses on trading, so started to offer courses on Udemy and later founded Trader Cobb to teach his personal technical trading strategies to others, specialising in checklist-based trading. According to Udemy, he has not only made himself a millionaire, but he has also helped many others become millionaires too. Craig has a podcast called The Trader Cobb Crypto Podcast and an excellent library of video training resources on his YouTube channel. Aside from trading, he loves to surf and is an active volunteer lifesaver, currently patrolling Tamarama beach in Sydney’s east. You can follow Craig Cobb on Twitter: @tradercobb

Sam Karagiozis

Sam Karagiozis’s knuckles famously bear the tattooed words “self made” because up until his 2019 incarceration, he was usually pictured with luxury cars; he owned a Lamborghini and a Bentley with personalised plates that read, “MR BTC”. Sam founded a Bitcoin ATM startup called Auscoin Group and attempted to start the digital currency for Australia, but it failed. He was arrested for allegedly importing more than 100 packages of drugs through the mail in 2016 and 2017. In 2019 he was granted bail and is now fighting to regain control over his chain of souvlaki stores and his Bitcoin empire. According to news.com.au, police allege he was the boss of the Melbourne drug ring that used the dark web and Bitcoin accounts to source, buy and distribute drugs as part of a multimillion-dollar importation operation.

Kingsley Advani

Kingsley Advani became a Bitcoin millionaire at age 24, back in 2017 when he sold all his worldly possessions and emptied thousands of dollars from his bank account to seek the once-in-a-lifetime returns potential of Bitcoin. According to a CEO Magazine article, Advani invested $34,000 into Bitcoin and other emerging blockchains. His net worth ballooned into seven figures within six months. Technically, Advani is British and not Australian, but he did study for a Bachelor’s degree in Finance and Economics at the University of Melbourne. You can follow Kingsley Advani on Twitter: @kadvani

Fred Schebesta

Fred Schebesta, 26, is one of the youngest Australian self-made millionaires, best known for co-founding the comparison website finder.com. While it’s not clear that his first millions were made in Bitcoin, he is a crypto evangelist, hosting a ‘daily crypto talk show’ from the offices of Finder. In February 2018, he and co-founder Frank Restuccia launched an Over-The-Counter (OTC) crypto exchange called HiveX, which facilitates trades between $50k to $100 million. He is currently focused on creating the very first crypto bank in Australia and launching Finder Crypto Mobile App. You can follow Fred Schebesta on Twitter: @Schebesta

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